Bewildering Stories receives...
An Extortion Threat
Update as of Wednesday 5 September: Officers in the Guelph Police Dept. and the RCMP concur that the extortion threat is most likely a fraud. The motive for a cyber assault is quite clear; the means and opportunity are not.
The most likely interpretation: an aggrieved party in an alleged crime — or a confederate — has impersonated an important computer-science collective for illegal purposes. Our readers may draw the same conclusions from clues in the message itself. The police have confirmed that the threat alone is a crime and caution against taking criminal intent lightly. That has been our position from the outset.
Bewildering Stories is grateful to the Canadian authorities for kindly sharing their expertise in the matter. Other authorities and jurisdictions in the U.S. may also appreciate being informed. The operations of the NSA [National Security Agency], in particular, are directly affected.
Bewildering Stories is one of the oldest and is almost certainly the largest literary webzine on the Internet. But it is not a police force; we judge submissions, not authors.
We’ve received demands in the past to delete works by authors of whom some people personally disapprove. We’ve always refused, because the same demand could be made for anyone, on any pretext or even none at all. If you’re a contributor to Bewildering Stories, “anyone” means you. If someone doesn’t like you, they may come gunning for you.
We’ve just received a kind of virtual ransomware threat from a group demanding we remove any reference to a certain author from the website within one week. The group in question says the author has been accused of various crimes, and the group claims to have been “paid well” to carry out this literary assassination:
As unfortunate as the situation is, we have been contracted to destroy his career. If his work is not off your website within one week we will be forced to take down your entire site and all child/parent sites connected to http://www.bewilderingstories.com. Your server has been probed and it is not worth wasting a Layer 7 attack on. We will remove all databases and leak any information found on any sites involving http://www.bewilderingstories.com in addition to defacing the website with any crime involving [the author in question].
Tell us, then, what do you intend to do about Hermann Goering? He, at least, got a trial at Nuremberg. The author in question has not yet been tried. Not that it matters: speech is free and open to discussion, no matter who the speaker is or whether the speaker is even known.
Worst of all, the hit men boast that they could infiltrate our webhost and delete whatever they want. But no, I’m supposed to do the work for them. Otherwise, they’ll punish everybody. Our webhost has been alerted to the threat.
Bewildering Stories is a world-wide organization, and cyber crime is international. The Guelph Police Department confirms that the group that has contacted us is known to U.S. government authorities. On Tuesday, after the holiday, we will contact the local police tech unit, the RCMP, and the FBI. Further steps may be necessary.
It is nice, I suppose, to be given a week’s notice. The Storm Troopers were not so considerate in the Nazizeit. The comparison is not much of a stretch: extortion for hire is merely organized crime; the suppression of thousands is political action. Don’t be surprised if bad things happen.
Don Webb
Managing Editor
Bewildering Stories
